A collection that suits me better

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies

I wonder, is it that Neil Clarke thinks more like I do, or that the editors of the last SF collection I reviewed think so very differently from me? I remarked at the end of that review that the "quality of the editor" matters much, but I ought to have used a word different from "quality". I'll ruminate on that…

Neil Clarke's fourth collection of The Best Science Fiction of the Year (the year 2018) does indeed include a much greater proportion of stories that greatly appeal to me, compared to several of the past year's "Best of" volumes. There are actually a number of excellent writers who have returned to the Dictum of Campbell, "Pose a problem, then solve it." That would include "Okay, Glory" by Elizabeth Bear and "Umberlight" by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Other stories raise the "alien viewpoint" subgenre to new levels, most notably "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller and "Theories of Flight" by Linda Nagata. I was quite taken with the love story within "Traces of Us" by Vanessa Fogg, with the overt theme of recorded intelligences, and how complete their experience might be.

I always recognize in Ken Liu's writing a political undercurrent, seeing that I number among my close friends a number of both Taiwan-born and China-born immigrants; that means I get Sino-centric news through channels that most in this country have no access to. In "Byzantine Empathy", though, I find a superb gut-level presentation of the unbridgeable gap between the "caring professional" and the empathy-driven amateur; the latter typically do all the heavy lifting that the former later take advantage of to advance their organizations. The use of VR technology to emotionally move (even propel) an audience will no doubt move off these pages into stark reality in the very near future.

This collection restores my optimism that writers are still having good new ideas, and some of those ideas may well move into mainstream thought. Reading this volume was a refreshing way to close out 2019.